Roque Cordero, born in Panama City in 1917, was a composer, conductor, and music educator whose career spanned both Panama and the US. In 1938 he founded the Orquesta de la Unión Musical which would later become the Orquesta Nacional de Panamá. After studying with Herbert de Castro and Myron Schaeffer in Panama, in 1943 he emigrated to the US where he studied at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. He studied conducting with Dimitri Mitropoulos, conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony. Mitropoulos introduced him to the composer Ernst Krenek, who became Cordero's composition professor. In 1946 Cordero also spent a summer at Tanglewood studying with Aaron Copland alongside a group of composition students including Juan Orrego-Salas, Leonard Bernstein, Lukas Foss, Irving Fine, Julian Orbón, Alberto Ginastera, and others.

As an educator and conductor Cordero held several positions in Panama after leaving Minnesota, including associate director of the National Conservatory, director of the National Music Institute, and artistic director and conductor of the Panama National Symphony Orchestra. After moving back to the United States in 1966, he held positions as assistant director of the Latin American Music Center and professor of composition at Indiana University, Bloomington. He began teaching at Illinois State University in 1972, where he would remain until his retirement in 1987.

Cordero also won acclaim as a composer. In 1957 his Second Symphony was awarded the "Caro de Boesi" prize at the Second Festival of Latin American Music in Caracas, Venezuela. He received commissions from the Kennedy Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Koussevitsky Foundation, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1949. His mature compositional style combined serialist techniques with Panamanian rhythms. Some of his other important works include the Violin Concerto (1962) and Cantata for Peace (1979). He died in 2008 in Dayton, OH.